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MS Teams Guest Access

09 Jun 2021

Using Microsoft Teams to communicate with external participants, create teams and share files.

Microsoft Teams logo

Microsoft (MS) Teams is part of the Microsoft 365 suite of applications used for chat, calls, meetings, collaboration and file sharing. The great news is that MS Teams already provides you with the ability to invite people from outside of the University to join your MS Teams meetings. It provides similar functionality to Zoom, but with the added benefit of greater security and additional features. 

The uptake of MS Teams is proving to be increasingly popular with around 50,000 meetings having been held via Teams across the University in the last 90 days. 

Inviting external parties to join your team and file-share 

Teams provides the additional benefit that you can invite external participants to join your MS Team as guests. This means you can collaborate more fully with trusted parties by sharing documents and files, holding meetings and having chats. Crucially, it provides you with control over who can access information, which is important for many research, teaching and other collaborative projects. This feature is called Guest Access and it will be made more widely available across the University early in the new academic year. 

Once you have been given Guest Access control, you will have the authority to invite participants external to the University to join your MS Team and file-share. It’s important to note that Guest Access works independently of MS Teams for SharePoint sites, Planner, Whiteboard and more.

Next steps 

We are currently working with a cohort of early adopters to generate the feedback we require to configure support, policies, and systems for the University-wide roll-out. 

Would you like to learn more about Guest Access? 

If you would like to know more about Guest Access and how it works, please visit our Teams FAQs page for more details.  

Also, you can read more about the difference between Guest Access and external access on Microsoft’s website. 

Support for Teams 

For resources and guides on using Teams please visit our dedicated StaffNet site:  

If you have questions why not raise them in our Yammer community?